Seven,all – embracing ,frameworks by Nahid Esfandiari
Seven' , all – embracing ,frameworks' ' '''The frame works included in this article are provided a comprehensive account of how people think and learn in contexs. the ‘all-embracing’ frameworks can be distinguished from most members of the critical thinking’ family in that they are not simply concerned with ‘higher-order’ thinking, but also deal with acquiring and building knowledge and understanding through action, sensation, perception and memory '''Romiszowski’s analysis of knowledge and skills' Romiszowski’s analysis of knowledge and skills forms part of his treatment of instructional design, which he places in the still widercontext of human resources development. to instructional design by taking into account information content, cognitive processing and behavioural responses. Romiszowski then outlines a four-stage skill cycle, applicable in the cognitive, psychomotor, ‘reactive’ (self-management) and ‘interactive’ (social interaction) skill domains. What he calls ‘reactive skills’ are reactions expressing appropriate feelings, attitudes and values. Similarly, ‘interactive skills’ express, in interpersonal contexts, appropriate feelings, attitudes and value systems: ‘voluntary reactions and actions, planned to lead to certain goals and involving the skills of self-control’ . The four stages of the cycle (perceive, recall, plan, and perform) are said to be usually but not always involved in skilled performance. It is interesting that Romiszowski places Bloom’s analyse, synthesise, evaluate under the single heading of planning skills and in fact subsumes the whole of Bloom’s taxonomy under only half of the skill cycle: recall and plan. The great strength of Romiszowski’s analysis is its simplicity and avoidance of idiosyncratic terminology. It should certainly be meaningful and useful to teachers and other educational professionals and it is also readily accessible to learners. Wallace and Adams’‘ Thinking Actively in a Social Context’ (TASC) Adams and Wallace to support curriculum developers, teachers and parents in enhancing the ‘thinking capacity’ of pupils in primary and secondary schools. It is described as a problem-solving framework and was first used in the context of disadvantaged communities in South Africa. The TASC model is presented as a cyclical process, represented by a wheel with eight sectors. Evaluate , communicate , learning from experience , gather\ organise , identify , generate , decide , implement . The TASC model includes all the cognitive and metacognitive categories one might expect, including strategic thinking and reflection on what has been learned. The TASC ‘Tools for Effective Thinking’ comprise a mixture of strategies that accommodate logical, creative and practical thinking. Dispositions are included under attitudinal and motivational factors, as well as under the communication headin. Jonassen and Tessmer’s taxonomy of learning outcomes Jonassen and Tessmer primarily ‘for the development and evaluation of computer-based learning systems for higher order thinking skills’ . They argue that current taxonomies should be adapted to take account of developments in instructional technology and educational research, particularly the development of multimedia and Internet-based instruction. They specifically seek to take account of higher-order dimensions of thinking such as ampliative (knowledge extension) skills, self-awareness and self-control. The taxonomy, as shown below, has 11 broad categories of learning outcome • declarative knowledge • structural knowledge • cognitive component skills • situated problem-solving • knowledge complexes • ampliative skills • self-knowledge • reflective self-knowledg • executive control strategies • motivation (disposition • attitude They suggest that knowledge of a taxonomy can facilitate task analysis in instructional design In 1999 they make the stronger claim that ‘if you are unable to articulate the kind of thinking (by classifying the kind of learning outcome required) that you expect learners to accomplish, you have no business trying to design instruction to support that learning. All kinds of learning outcome, whether cognitive, motor or psychosocial, can be categorised by using the framework. It brings together cognitive, metacognitive, affective and conative (motivational) dimensions. We concur with the authors’ claim to have improved on the taxonomies of Bloom, Gagne´ and Merrill by including learning outcomes which: a. reflect learned behaviours (by which they seem to mean abilities rather than skills) including inferencing, analogising, assessing task difficulty and decomposing problems; b. reflect cognitive structures acquired in learning such as structural knowledge, self-knowledge and mental models; and c. are traditional, such as attitudes, procedures, rules, concepts and problem-solving. Hauenstein’s conceptual framework for educational objectives he accommodated the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains His book sets out a revised version of the original, based on the idea that teachers should not lose sight of the whole person as a learner, since ‘We are what we believe, what we think, and most of all, what we do’ The composite Behavioural Domain taxonomy has five levels, defined (in brief ) in the following way: 1. Acquisition – Ability to receive, perceive and conceptualise a concept, idea, 2. Assimilation – Ability to comprehend and make appropriate responses in a situation. 3. Adaptation – Ability to modify knowledge, skills and dispositions which conform to ascribed qualities, criteria and standards. 4. Performance – Ability to evaluate situations and be productive. 5. Aspiration – Ability to synthesise knowledge and seek to master skills and demonstrate these in behaviour. Hauenstein claims that his treatment of ‘long-term objectives’ provides a better account of critical thinking, reflective thinking, problemsolving and decision-making than Bloom’s ‘higher-order’ categories analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Hauenstein uses only two categories, Evaluation and Synthesis, each with two sub-categories. He sees ‘Analysis’ as a necessary part of Evaluation, preceding measurement against a criterion or standard (which he calls ‘Qualification’). Synthesis follows Evaluation and is defined as ‘ability to hypothesise and resolve complex problems which yield new arrangements and answers’ Synthesis is seen as the highest level of thought, as it can include creative, innovative thinking. Hauenstein differs from Bloom in placing Evaluation below Synthesis and in treating ‘Analysis’ as only a sub-category Vermunt and Verloop’s categorisation of learning activities Vermunt and Verloop use the same dimensions to present what they call a taxonomy or categorisation of learning activities It should be noted that Vermunt and Verloop use the terms ‘metacognitive’ and ‘regulative’ interchangeably when referring to a type of learning activity (the other types being cognitive and affective). They define the metacognitive regulation of learning processes as ‘exerting control over one’s own cognitive and affective processing of subject matter’ Vermunt and Verloop expand on the meaning of each category, but mostly at an abstract or general level. Some paraphrased examples are given below: Relating/structuring means looking for connections, including partwhole relationships and those between new information and prior knowledge. Analysing means breaking down a whole into its parts and studying those parts or aspects in a step-by-step fashion. Concretising/applying includes thinking of examples and using subject matter to interpret experiences and solve problems. Critical processing means forming a personal judgment of the correctness of information presented. Selecting means finding and studying the most important parts. Attributing means ascribing learning outcomes to causal factors. Appraising means deciding whether a learning task is worth the time and effort. Dealing with emotions means being positive and coping with negative feelings. Monitoring/testing/diagnosing means observing, during task performance, whether the learning process proceeds according to plan, and if not, finding a reason. Evaluating means judging how far the learning proceeded as planned and was successful. Reflecting means thinking over what has happened as well as about learning experiences in general. Marzano’s new taxonomy of educational objectives Marzano’s initial purpose was to produce a theory-driven meta-analysis of educational instruction using categories specific and functional enough to provide guidance for classroom practice. In his later book the theory is presented as a taxonomy to help teachers and others design educational objectives, spiral curricula and assessments. the theoretical model is a hierarchical system in which the self system controls the metacognitive system which in turn controls the cognitive system Each of these operates on the retrieved content of an individual’s knowledge domain, which comprises stored information and knowledge of mental and psychomotor procedures. This knowledge can be represented linguistically, non-linguistically or in an affective (emotional) form. At the top of the hierarchy of consciousness and control is the self system, in which attention and motivation are controlled in accordance with beliefs and calculations of discrepancies between perceived and desired states. The knowledge domain is comprised of declarative and procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is subdivided into organising ideas (principles and generalisations) and details (episodes, cause–effect sequences, time sequences, facts and vocabulary terms). Procedural knowledge is said to consist of more or less complex mental and psychomotor processes and skills. Mental skills are broken down into tactics, algorithms and single rules. Sternberg’s model of abilities as developing expertise Well known for his ‘triarchic’ theory of critical, creative and practical intelligence and to a lesser extent for his model of thinking styles. He claims that the development of expertise involves the interaction of at least the following elements: 1. Metacognitive skills: these refer to people’s understanding and control of their thought processes. 2. Learning skills: these are seen as sometimes explicit, when we make an effort to learn, or implicit when we pick up information incidentally, without any systematic effort. 3. Thinking skills: there are three main kinds of thinking skill that individuals need to master – • critical (analytical) thinking skills, including: analysing, critiquing, judging, evaluating, comparing and contrasting, and assessing; • creative thinking skills, including: creating, discovering, inventing, imagining, supposing, and hypothesising; • practical thinking skills, which are ‘involved when intelligence is applied to real world contexts and depend heavily on ‘tacit knowledge, namely the procedural knowledge one learns in everyday life that usually is not taught and often is not even verbalized. 4. Knowledge: declarative knowledge is knowledge of facts, concepts, principles, laws etc. – ‘knowing that’. Procedural knowledge is knowledge of procedures and strategies – ‘knowing how’. Sternberg does not devalue teaching for knowledge outcomes, as without this foundation students cannot think critically about what they know. 5. Motivation: while noting that it is indispensable for school success, Sternberg has tended not to consider motivation to the same extent as the cognitive elements. 6. Context: all the elements above are seen as characteristics of the learner, but Sternberg notes that all these processes are affected by, and can in turn affect, the context in which they operate .